VIRGINIA WOOLF

  
"Why Virginia Woolf?" is a question I get asked fairly often, as in "Why would you want to write a contemporary novel that spins out of the life and work of someone as, well, scary and forbidding and SERIOUS as Virginia Woolf?"

Sometimes I just shrug. Hey, a novel's got to be about something, right? And sometimes, when I'm feeling spry, I say, "Because she was a genius and a visionary, because she was a rock star, because she was the first writer to split the atom, because I'm in love with her, because she knew that everyone, every single person, is the hero of his or her own epic story."

For me, a significant part of her greatness lies in her insistence that there are no ordinary lives, just inadequate ways of looking at them. Woolf understood that most of our lives look ordinary from the outside, but that to us they are anything but; to us our lives are enormous and fascinating, even if they appear to be made up largely of work, errands, meals and sleep. She spent her career writing the extraordinary, epic tales of people who seem to be doing nothing unusual at all. If most great writers scan the heavens like astrophysicists, Woolf looked penetratingly at the very small, like a microbiologist. Through her books, we understand that the workings of atomic particles are every bit as mysterious and enormous as the workings of galaxies -- it all depends on whether you look out or look in.

-- Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

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